26 accepted papers
Finding evidence for human opinion and behavior at scale is a challenging task, often requiring an understanding of sophisticated thought patterns among vast online communities found on social media. For example, studying how ‘gun ownership’ is related to the perception of ‘Freedom’, requires a retr…
In this paper, we introduce EmoGist, a training-free, in-context learning method for performing visual emotion classification with LVLMs. The key intuition of our approach is that context-dependent definition of emotion labels could allow more accurate predictions of emotions, as the ways in which e
Large language models (LLMs) struggle in social science domains, where critical thinking and human-level inference are crucial. In this work, we propose a multi-agent social reasoning framework that leverages the generative and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to generate and evaluate reasons from mul…
Conversations often adhere to well-understood social norms that vary across cultures. For example, while addressing parents by name is commonplace in the West, it is rare in most Asian cultures. Adherence or violation of such norms often dictates the tenor of conversations. Humans are able to naviga…
Climate change communication on social media increasingly employs microtargeting strategies to effectively reach and influence specific demographic groups. This study presents a *post-hoc* analysis of microtargeting practices within climate campaigns by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to exa
Large Language Models (LLMs) not only have solved complex reasoning problems but also exhibit remarkable performance in tasks that require subjective decision-making. Existing studies suggest that LLM generations can convey subjectivity to some extent, yet exploring whether LLMs can account for indi
Analyzing ideological discourse even in the age of LLMs remains a challenge, as these models often struggle to capture the key elements that shape real-world narratives. Specifically, LLMs fail to focus on characteristic elements driving dominant discourses and lack the ability to integrate contextu…
The widespread use of social media has led to a surge in popularity for automated methods of analyzing public opinion. Supervised methods are adept at text categorization, yet the dynamic nature of social media discussions poses a continual challenge for these techniques due to the constant shifting…
Understanding human social behavior such as recognizing emotions and the social dynamics causing them is an important and challenging problem. While LLMs have made remarkable advances, they are limited to the textual domain and cannot account for the major role that non-verbal cues play in understan
The recent rise of social media has led to the spread of large amounts of fake and biased news, content published with the intent to sway beliefs. While detecting and profiling the sources that spread this news is important to maintain a healthy society, it is challenging for automated systems.In th…
State bills have a significant impact on various aspects of society, including health, education, and the economy. Consequently, it is crucial to conduct systematic research on state bills before and after they are enacted to evaluate their benefits and drawbacks, thereby guiding future decision-mak…
The large scale usage of social media, combined with its significant impact, has made it increasingly important to understand it. In particular, identifying user communities, can be helpful for many downstream tasks. However, particularly when models are trained on past data and tested on future, do…
Political discourse on social media often contains similar language with opposing intended meanings. For example, the phrase thoughts and prayers, is used to express sympathy for mass shooting victims, as well as satirically criticize the lack of legislative action on gun control. Understanding such…
Social media has become a major driver of social change, by facilitating the formation of online social movements. Automatically understanding the perspectives driving the movement and the voices opposing it, is a challenging task as annotated data is difficult to obtain. We propose a weakly supervi…
Experts across diverse disciplines are often interested in making sense of large text collections. Traditionally, this challenge is approached either by noisy unsupervised techniques such as topic models, or by following a manual theme discovery process. In this paper, we expand the definition of a…
Understanding and characterizing the discus- sions around key events in news streams is important for analyzing political discourse. In this work, we study the problem of identification of such key events and the news articles associated with those events from news streams. We propose a generic fram…
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to infodemic of low quality information leading to poor health decisions. Combating the outcomes of this infodemic is not only a question of identifying false claims, but also reasoning about the decisions individuals make. In this work we propose a holistic analysis fr…
Decisions on state-level policies have a deep effect on many aspects of our everyday life, such as health-care and education access. However, there is little understanding of how these policies and decisions are being formed in the legislative process. We take a data-driven approach by decoding the…
Easy access, variety of content, and fast widespread interactions are some of the reasons making social media increasingly popular. However, this rise has also enabled the propagation of fake news, text published by news sources with an intent to spread misinformation and sway beliefs. Detecting it…
Large-scale language models have been reducing the gap between machines and humans in understanding the real world, yet understanding an individual’s theory of mind and behavior from text is far from being resolved. This research proposes a neural model—Subjective Ground Attention—that learns subjec…
Extracting moral sentiment from text is a vital component in understanding public opinion, social movements, and policy decisions. The Moral Foundation Theory identifies five moral foundations, each associated with a positive and negative polarity. However, moral sentiment is often motivated by its…
Understanding narrative text requires capturing characters’ motivations, goals, and mental states. This paper proposes an Entity-based Narrative Graph (ENG) to model the internal- states of characters in a story. We explicitly model entities, their interactions and the context in which they appear,…
Politicians often have underlying agendas when reacting to events. Arguments in contexts of various events reflect a fairly consistent set of agendas for a given entity. In spite of recent advances in Pretrained Language Models, those text representations are not designed to capture such nuanced pat…
Cross-lingual document search is an information retrieval task in which the queries’ language and the documents’ language are different. In this paper, we study the instability of neural document search models and propose a novel end-to-end robust framework that achieves improved performance in cros…
The ability to change a person’s mind on a given issue depends both on the arguments they are presented with and on their underlying perspectives and biases on that issue. Predicting stance changes require characterizing both aspects and the interaction between them, especially in realistic settings…
We describe two end-to-end autoencoding models for semi-supervised graph-based projective dependency parsing. The first model is a Locally Autoencoding Parser (LAP) encoding the input using continuous latent variables in a sequential manner; The second model is a Globally Autoencoding Parser (GAP) e…